Tony Bennett’s Amazing Life

Only one man can say that he has both recorded a jazz album with Lady Gaga and liberated a Nazi death camp.

Lede of the Week honors go to “Only one man can say that he has both recorded a jazz album with Lady Gaga and liberated a Nazi death camp, and that man’s name is Tony Bennett.”

My sardonic response is that the latter almost makes up for the first but, of course, they’re both pretty awesome. Even if you’re not a particular fan of Gaga (and I’m not) Bennett’s continued working, much less relevance, in his ninth decade is simply remarkable.

The line above is Asawin Suebsaeng’s opener to a Daily Beast feature titled “Tony Bennett’s Nazi Hunting Past Is Just One Reason He’s the Greatest Living American.”

Bennett has been singing for over six decades, scoring his first Billboard No. 1 in 1951. Collaborating with much younger pop and rock stars nowadays isn’t all that unusual for him; he’s recorded songs with Amy Winehouse, Mariah Carey, and Bono, to name a few.

But his long, awards-heavy career in music is hardly the most fascinating—or admirable—thing about him. In his younger days, Bennett killed fascists, became a hardcore anti-war liberal, and fought for civil rights.

In 1944, Bennett (then Anthony Benedetto) was drafted as a teenager into the Army in the closing year of World War II. He was assigned to the Seventh Army, 63rd Infantry Division of the 255th Regiment, G Company, and was deployed to France in the harsh winter of 1945. By March, he and his fellow servicemen had reached Germany, where they were sent to the front lines and where Bennett witnessed a hell of a lot of death and destruction.

“Nighttime was the worst,” Bennett wrote in his autobiography. “We couldn’t light any fires to keep warm; we couldn’t even light a cigarette, because the glow would be detected by the Germans and give away our position.”

The final official mission of the 255th Regiment was the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp in Landsberg, a town just 30 miles south of Dachau. “I’ll never forget the desperate faces and empty stares of the prisoners as they wandered aimlessly around the campgrounds,” Bennett wrote. “Once we took possession of the camp, we immediately got food and water to the survivors, but they had been brutalized for so long that at first they couldn’t believe that we were there to help them and not to kill them…To our horror we discovered that all of the women and children had been killed long before our arrival and that just the day before, half the remaining survivors had been shot…The whole thing was beyond comprehension.”

Bennett’s service turned him into the ultimate peacenik. “The first time I saw a dead German, that’s when I became a pacifist,” he told Howard Stern in 2011.

“Anybody who thinks that war is romantic obviously hasn’t gone through one,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Actually the war comedies likeM*A*S*H and Catch-22 are probably a more accurate depiction of war than the ‘guts and glory’ films, because they show how pathetic the whole enterprise is…Every war is insane, no matter where it is or what it’s about. Fighting is the lowest form of human behavior…No human being should have to go to war, especially an eighteen-year-old boy.”

After Germany surrendered, Bennett was stationed there as part of the Allied occupying force. It was during this period that he was caught fraternizing with a black soldier—at a time when the U.S. Armed Forces were racially segregated. As a result, an Army captain literally spat on Bennett’s corporal stripes and assigned him to Graves Registration, where he had to dig up the bodies of deceased military personnel.

This brush with institutionalized racism changed Bennett’s life, and informed his decision to sign up with the Civil Rights Movement. He participated in the historic 50-mile Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965. To rally the crowd, Bennett sang on a makeshift stage constructed out of dozens of empty coffins.

“I didn’t want to do it, but then [fellow singer and social activist] Harry Belafontetold me what went down…how some blacks were burned, had gasoline thrown on them,” Bennett told CNN last year. “When I heard that, I said, ‘I’ll go with you.'”

That’s a pretty remarkable life.

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James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Franklin says:

    I was unaware of Bennett’s past. This certainly makes me want to pay attention to what he does from now on, with whatever time he has left.

  2. ernieyeball says:
  3. ernieyeball says:
  4. ernieyeball says:

    I think some of Lady Gaga’s tunes are quite catchy and if I had enough money to pay to be carried about in an egg I’m sure I would do it.

    http://i.huffpost.com/gen/247328/GAGA-EGG.jpg

  5. ernieyeball says:

    Well damn. It took me 50 years to figure out that he calls it “Fingertips” (pt. 1 and 2) because that’s how you play a harp!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cSjOxqldFs

  6. MarkedMan says:

    Another guy who doesn’t get as much credit in the civil rights movement as he deserves is Bing Crosby, probably because he was so low key about it. He had a very rough childhood and at an early age started hanging around a black jazz club, where the owners and musicians half raised him. His first recorded song was a novelty number about how silly it was that the “white birds” wouldn’t let the “black birds” play with them. This was in the ’20s.

  7. Anjin-San says:

    Bennett pops up at Giants games a few times a year, he pretty much owns the town. I left my heart in San Francisco is played after every home win. He is
    also a talented painter.